He paused. Maureen looked fixedly at her hands folded in her lap. She felt certain that every eye in the room was on her. She wanted to jump up and scream, “But I was with Mr. Evans!” The rhetorical pause seemed to last for minutes.
“Hell and death, sirs, there is! She has been with us all the time, and never once have we thought of her as anything but that staunch and loyal housekeeper, Mrs. Hudson! Her spirit,” he plunged on, riding recklessly over the murmurs of astonishment, “has been more than demonstrated on the occasion of the encounter with the supposed Ricoletti in the garret. She is obviously a far more attractive woman than she allows herself to seem; why should that be if she were not seeking deliberately to minimize her beauty and the dire consequences which it brought her in the past? The poor woman was one of Worth’s victims, she sought this position (under the assumed name which was the chief qualification for the job) in order to confront him again, and when she saw through the plot which he was perpetrating, she realized that her moment of vengeance had come.”
“I refuse to believe,” said Jonadab Evans reverently, “that such a cook could be guilty of the slightest offense.”
“At least you’ll admit,” Ridgly contributed from his couch, “that it’s in the best Doyle tradition. Vengeance dating back into the past, disguises, a Woman’s Honor—”
Rufus Bottomley stroked his beard. “What do the rest of you think?”
“I think,” said Lieutenant Jackson, “that this has gone just about far enough. Dr. Bottomley, did you once have in your employ a girl named Ann Larsen?”
Dr. Bottomley turned in surprise. “I—that is—”
“Please, Doctor. I’ve checked this with the New York police. Don’t bluff. Did you?”
“Yes.”
“And was Ann Larsen found in your office one day, unconscious as the result of a peculiarly vicious attack?”
“Yes.”
“And did Ann Larsen never fully recover her sanity, so that you had to send her to the rest home of your friend, Dr. Withers?”
“Yes, but—”
“And was Stephen Worth a patient of yours at that time?”
“He had consulted me about—”
“So that he might have come into your office, accidentally or otherwise, while you were out? And did you not realize, from Mr. Ridgly’s story of the office assistant who suffered a relapse on hearing Worth’s name, that he must have been Ann Larsen’s assailant?”
The imperial was all that was left of the former Dr. Rufus Bottomley. Behind it was a drawn old face above a saggy body. “I fail to see, Lieutenant—” he said hopelessly.
Jackson turned to Lieutenant Finch. “There you are, Herman. There’s your case.”
The senior Lieutenant looked undecided. “Good work digging up all that stuff, Andy. But remember the man’s alibi.”
“And who gives him that alibi? Dr. Withers, who has seen Ann Larsen relapse from an almost cured patient to a helpless wreck at the sound of Worth’s name. Do you think, after that, he would betray Worth’s murderer?”
“I can say nothing, gentlemen.” Bottomley was seated now. His voice was thin and old. “It is true that from the moment I knew him for Ann’s attacker, I wanted to kill Worth. That girl was a daughter to me, and the man who destroyed her life deserved even greater punishment than any that I could inflict upon him. My only defense is that I believed Worth to be already dead. If I had seen through his hoax, you may rest assured that I should have made it come true. I did not. You may believe that or not as you choose. Since Worth and Crews and Ridgly among them drove Ann back to madness, I do not care.”
Ridgly laughed. “So now I’m a villain too, Bottomley? Very well; but I think you’re a bit hard on Worth. If wanting to ravish that blonde is a stamp of villainy, I’m a member of the club. Won’t somebody give me a drink?”
“No,” said Lieutenant Finch.
“Well, Herman?” Jackson asked. “I’m sorry as hell for the poor devil, but—”
“But you want to clear your good name as a detective,” said Ridgly courteously.
“Look here, you foulmouthed rat! Because you’re laid up on a couch with a—”
“Andy, Andy.” Finch’s tone was the one he used to employ on drunks in the old days on the beat—soothing but stern. “Hold your horses. Let’s hear what the others have to say. Go on, Evans.”
“I must confess,” the chair resumed, “that I have been a bit shaken by these accusations, and not a little surprised. Herr Federhut, do you have some further startling denouncement to make?”
The Austrian shook his white head. “As you know, I was a jurist in my own land. To my mind only in the stories should the amateur solve the crime. In reality I am contented with the police. To them belongs the task; I am only a poor émigré who sits and listens.”
“That is kind of you, Herr Federhut.” Mr. Evans’ words bore a strong emphasis which seemed meaningless at the moment. In the pause following them came a sudden glurp from the door.
“Did you speak, Sergeant?”
For a moment everyone turned. They had quite forgotten their Watson. Under this cluster of glances, the Sergeant looked embarrassed. “I didn’t say a thing,” he muttered. “Just swallowed a piece of Lifesaver. Sorry I sort of busted into things.”
“That’s quite all right, my dear Watson.”
The Sergeant frowned. “Say. As long as I interrupted. What’s that he said he was?”
“Who said?”
“He said he was only a poor something-or-other.”
“Herr Federhut said that he was an émigré—a person who had left his native land. It is a French word.”
“But I thought he was a German.” Sergeant Watson seemed to find this a suspicious circumstance.
Federhut smiled. “In the Third Reich, the poor writers are supposed to use bloss echt deutsche Wörter—only truly German words. But we émigrés, Gott sei Dank, we can speak as we please. It is, you perceive, elementary, my dear Watson.”
The Sergeant’s frown deepened. “I guess you guys got to have your fun,” he said darkly.
“Mr. Ridgly?” the chair asked.
“So John O’Dab wants to save his big Derring Drew set piece for the grand finale? Let all the rest of us speak our little pieces and then—boom! comes the blaze of glory. Fun and games for all! All right, I’ll stooge, if I can have a drink.”
“No,” said Finch patiently.
Ridgly shrugged. “Now one thing hurts me about all this. You’re so exclusively worried about Stephen Worth. None of your solutions yet gives a damn about who shot me. I don’t want to seem conceited—a Ridgly never puts on airs, not even a Ridgly III—but I do think my case ought to be considered, even if I didn’t die. Attempted murder’s a crime too, isn’t it, Lieutenant? And now can I have a drink?”
“Yes,” answered Finch, “to your first question. The answer to the second is still no.”
“Very well,” said Harrison Ridgly III. “Then I won’t tell you who shot me.”
Chapter 23
“What the hell” Lieutenant Finch’s was the loudest of the various similar exclamations which sounded through the room. “Then you do know, and you’ve been holding out on us? Come clean, Ridgly.”
“For one small drink. Not too small.”
“You’ll tell us without anything or you’ll be liable as an accessory,” said Finch with fine disregard for the stricter points of law.
“Let him have his drink, Herman,” Jackson urged. “It won’t kill him.”
Finch grunted. “All right. Pour him a shot, Miss O’Breen, if you please. Now, Ridgly, who did you recognize?”
Ridgly downed his shot straight and looked wistfully at the bottle. “No one, Lieutenant,” he smiled.
“But you said—”
“I said I’d tell you who shot me. I will, too; but by reconstruction, not by recognition. Listen, my children: last night, when I was shot, there were only five other people in this house: Mrs. Hudson, Evans, Bottomle
y, Sergeant Watson, and Lieutenant Finch. We can strike you out, Lieutenant, and with you our dear, if somewhat elemental, Watson; and despite Dr. Bottomley’s astounding conclusions, I refuse to take Mrs. Hudson seriously as a person of this drama. Though I might have had some motive for attacking Evans over his absurd accusation of sororicide (for at the time I thought it his own invention; I realize now that it was part of Worth’s little game), there was no earthly reason why he should try to shoot me. That leaves us with—come now, gentlemen, on your toes! Whom does that leave? Exactly—Dr. Rufus Bottomley.”
“Very neat,” said Finch skeptically. “Excepting that he had no earthly reason either.”
“No? You have seen how fanatical he is on the subject of the tragedy of Ann Larsen. In my Warburtonian adventure I had come near the truth of that tragedy, and worse, I had made mock of it and vaunted my own—to use the doctor’s term—satyriac thoughts concerning that lovely wench. I was guilty of sacrilege against his darling.”
For a moment Dr. Bottomley’s old spirit flared again. “Hell and death!” he cried. “Will you stop tormenting me?”
“I have learned my lesson,” said Ridgly. “I never torment snakes that may strike back.” He laid his hand on his wound.
“Then you’re with Jackson on this,” said Finch judiciously. “It’s all Bottomley?”
“Oh no. Not at all. I’ve met Dr. Withers. I’m sure he would never endanger his professional standing by supplying a murderer, however noble, with an alibi. Our eminent literary medico is merely a would-be murderer, and a bungler at that.”
“Then who—?”
“It’s quite simple really. Whose movements have been completely unchecked? Who has displayed the training and ability to track Worth down? Who held a deep-rooted grudge against him because he had been made ridiculous and because his whole professional career had been imperiled by Worth’s hoax? Who was indicated by half of the dancing men?”
“OK,” said Sergeant Watson out of the blue. “Who?”
“To put it most simply, my dear Watson—who found Worth?”
Jackson rose suddenly and loomed over the couch, a towering monument of ire. Then slowly the wrath faded from his face, and a good-natured grin took its place. “All right,” he said slowly. “Touché. That’s a pretty job, Ridgly, especially that about the dancing men. The other half did say, ‘Remember the police,’ didn’t it? Well, I’m not saying there mightn’t have been trouble if I’d found Worth alive. But it would have been fists—not a gun.”
“Have you more to add, Mr. Ridgly?” the chair inquired.
“Isn’t that enough? Look how the Cossacks stick together; not a peep out of our respected Lieutenant Finch. Jackson’s a copper, so he’s got to be innocent.”
“What do you expect me to do?” Finch demanded. “If I made an arrest every time one of you boys has a bright idea, I’d have to hire a bus to take the mob to the station. I’m biding my time. Go on, Mr. Evans.”
“Hm.” The chair paused. “I should like now to present my own notion of what may have happened this morning at the Hotel Elite. And like some of those who have spoken before me, I feel that your great fault has been in overlooking a logical candidate.
“Gentlemen, I have said, and you agreed with me, that our suspect should be clever enough to see through Stephen Worth’s plan. But how much simpler it is if we consider a man who knew that plan—a man who was in Worth’s confidence, who could approach him, even in his hide-out, without suspicion, who could keep in touch with him by code communication and know where he was at any moment. The motive, I admit, must be a matter of conjecture; but any business dealings with Worth, as I am certain F. X. Weinberg would assure us, are in themselves quite as valid presumptions of motivation as are Dr. Bottomley’s conjectures of assult. With such overwhelming evidence of opportunity, even though motives remain obscure, I offer for your consideration the name of Vernon Crews.”
“Vernon Crews?” Finch did not look pleased. “But he hasn’t even been under consideration.”
“Exactly, Lieutenant. Therein lay his safety. And what is your opinion of this—I believe you term him a “ribber’—as our leading candidate, Miss O’Breen?”
“I—I don’t rightly know. You sprang it so out-of-the-blue-like. I think and always have thought that Vernon Crews is a very low form of life, but a murderer—”
“And you, Herr Doktor Otto Federhut, what do you think of the notion?”
“I am at a loss, Herr Evans. What is it that I should know of this impersonator, this—ah, this boner?”
“I think that you should know a great deal, Herr Federhut. Because, you see, you are Vernon Crews!”
If the room had been startled before, it was now reduced to chaos. Over the babbling babel rose the heavy voice of the white-maned Austrian, swearing intently in a dialect which no one understood.
“Quiet!” said Lieutenant Finch forcefully. “Now Evans—what do you mean? Even if the man’s an imposter, he can’t be a murderer. He was in Pasadena at the APRP.”
“There are other members of the Crews Acting Company, as we know from our adventures. He could easily send one of them to the APRP, apparently on an ordinary hoaxing excursion, while he attended to—ah, to the matter in hand.”
“Andy, get Arbuthnot on the phone. Find out if he’d ever met Federhut before.”
“OK, Herman.”
“This,” Mr. Evans went on explaining, “was the start and focus of all Worth’s trick—to plant a confederate in our very midst. He knew of Federhut’s European reputation and his monograph on the Holmes-Mythos. It was not unnatural that a man of his attainments should be in exile, voluntary or otherwise. Actually, the authentic Federhut is probably now in a concentration camp. Crews was sent to New York to present himself to us. Worth knew all along that we would naturally suggest that ‘Federhut’ be added to Mr. Weinberg’s list of guests.
“I might add two more points, small in themselves but nonetheless contributory. He was heard this morning talking over the phone in a number code. What could this have been but some communication with Worth, who, as we know, used such a code? And his refusal to advance a hypothesis is indicative in reverse: he was afraid that if he advanced too cogent a case to incriminate someone else, the police might suspect a purpose in it. Here, however, he underplayed his hand dangerously; a refusal to make intellectual conjectures about a mystery is completely out of character for a Baker Street Irregular.”
“And the clue?” asked Harrison Ridgly. “The squiggle men and Amy Gray?”
“Simplicity itself. Grasping that fake Holmes message meant simply, ‘My murderer is the man who played my fake Holmes tricks.’”
The old émigré had stopped swearing. Now he was laughing so heartily that his white mane was like a mop being shaken out. “Herr Leutnant,” he gasped, “do you wish to pull at my hair that you may assure yourself of its reality?”
“Just a minute,” Maureen interposed. “Dr. Bottomley, when was the party when you initiated Federhut?”
Bottomley roused himself from his melancholy contemplations. “Let me see. It was the night before the Fourth—the third of July, I think. Yes, I am certain.”
“That was the night that Crews spoke before the Daughters of the British Lion. He was supposed to be the man who makes all Chamberlain’s umbrellas, and he told them the strangest things.”
Jackson came back in. “Arbuthnot says he’s known Federhut since the ’20’s in Vienna.”
“That I could have told you,” Federhut laughed. “But everyone must you ask save only me. More I could have told you also about those numbers. I am delighted that I am suspect of the ability to talk in code—truly a rare achievement. But I must confess that all I was doing was to ask the omnibus company the times of their vehicles, repeating the hours as they to me read them. I am sad that it is so simple.”
Finch looked at Mr. Evans. It might almost have been called a glare. “I thought,” he said with measured scorn, “that I might get so
mething out of this little see-ance, but I guess I’m wrong. Each of you’s trying so all-fired hard to find out the most impossible answer that we’re getting nowhere fast.”
“But Lieutenant,” Mr. Evans protested, “it was your own suggestion that we—”
“I know. Andy said I was crazy and I guess I was. It’s about time to tell you that I came here tonight with a warrant in my pocket. Don’t all jump. I’m not going to use it. You’ve done that much for me; you’ve shown me what happens when you go off half cocked. I want to get my facts straight before I do anything definite. But if it isn’t out of parliamentary procedure, Mr. Chairman, I’d like to ask a couple of questions.”
“I assure you, Lieutenant, you need not be so bitterly ironic. The floor is yours.”
“Fine. Now, Professor Furness, who’s the secretary of the Department of English at U.C.L.A.?”
“I believe,” said Drew Furness, “that her name is Gwendolyn Abercrombie. I am afraid that no one ever speaks of her save as Abbie.”
“And did she take your dictation today?”
“Naturally. No—just a moment. Abbie is away for the summer. There was a strange girl, I don’t know her name.”
“What did she look like?”
“I think that she was smallish.”
“What was she wearing?”
“Heavens, Lieutenant, I don’t notice women’s clothes. I never have.”
“Was she blonde or brunette?”
“She—Frankly, I don’t know.”
“Of course you don’t know. Because, Professor Furness, you never saw her.”
“I never saw her?” The academician’s echo floated feebly through the silent room.
“Of all those five perfect alibis, Furness, yours was the one with the hole in it. You never signed the letters you dictated. And why? Because you weren’t there, and you didn’t dare risk a false signature going into the files and maybe being spotted later. You knew that a substitute secretary would be in the office for the summer. You aren’t teaching summer school; she would only know that there was a Drew Furness on the regular staff, and if a man came in, gave that name, and started dictating letters, she’d never know the difference. I don’t know who your accomplice was, but the scheme wasn’t quite good enough. Tomorrow we’ll confront you with this girl, and we’ll have the whole story.”
The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars Page 25